Raising Minnesota

Over twenty-five years, fourteen films, five Steve Buscemis, three disastrous kidnappings, and one big Lebowski, the Coen brothers have painted a richly textured portrait of a place that looks disturbingly like America. Here they chat with Franz Lidz about their collaborative process, the possibility of a Barton Fink sequel, and their dark new comedy, A Serious Man

in 1987 an outraged moviegoer wrote to the Coen brothers to complain about all the Polish jokes in their new ﬁlm, Raising Arizona. The (presumably Polish) man and his mother had been so offended that they stormed out of the theater. “Next time,” the letter huffed, “why don’t you make a ﬁlm about Jews?”

Twenty-two years later, they have. “In a way,” says Ethan of this month’s A Serious Man, “it’s our Jew film.”

Like every other Coen movie—and there have been fourteen, including Fargo and No Country for Old Men, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2008—A Serious Man features crisp dialogue; twisted, grotesque characters; and a pinwheeling series of misunderstandings. The setting and the milieu overlap the childhood of Joel, 54, and Ethan, 52, two suburban Jewish lads from Minnesota whose parents were college professors.

As filmmakers, the Coens are pristine perfectionists who take well-worn movie genres and reimagine them. Each feature is its own hermetically sealed world, visually, physically, metaphorically. Yet confronted by critics and doctoral candidates seeking to impose allegorical or symbolic explanations on films that strive to avoid definition, the brothers turn as elusive as the airborne fedora in Miller’s Crossing.

Still, they’re a lot of fun to talk to. We found them to be sharp, playful, and casually cooperative—finishing each other’s sentences and enlisting an interviewer in a kind of conspiracy against seriousness. Indeed, at times it was hard to tell whether they were joking or not. Which may have been the point.

How does the seed of a typical Coen brothers screenplay germinate?ethan: We sit in a room and talk the movie back and forth.joel: We have disagreements; they get argued out. We never fight.
ethan: I’m usually the one at the computer, simply because I’m the better typist. We start with random things and try to come up with something that’s interesting and surprising but doesn’t seem arbitrary and does make us laugh.joel: With A Serious Man, for a long time we wanted to make a short film about a bar mitzvah boy who goes to see an aged rabbi. ethan: We based the rabbi on one we knew when we were growing up—a sage, a Yoda who didn’t say much but had great charisma.joel:O Brother, Where Art Thou? began with the idea of a movie about three dopes.
ethan: Then we thought of escapees from a chain gang. Those two genres seemed to work well together as a starting point.

Wasn’t Barton Fink—the tale of a screenwriter’s battle with writer’s block—written during your own bout of writer’s block?joel: Yeah, while stuck on the script of Miller’s Crossing.ethan: We had this vision of John Turturro and John Goodman sitting on the edge of a bed and ran with it.

I’ve heard you stopped writing Fargo on the page that Carl Showalter, the crook played by Steve Buscemi, is having sex with an escort in the apartment of Shep Proudfoot, the Native American ex-con.joel: Right. The script sat on our desks for months.ethan: Months! Actually, it was years.joel: Yeah, it was years. The last line we had written was “FADE IN, Shep’s apartment. Carl is humping the escort.” We didn’t know where to go from there.ethan: Years later, one of us added the line “Shep comes back to the apartment and beats the shit out of Carl.” It now seems so obvious.

Tell me about the Talmudic moment during the Fargo shoot when you mulled whether there should be a sock on Buscemi’s foot as he gets shredded in the wood chipper.joel: We did have a long discussion about the options—sock, shoe, or bare foot. It wasn’t clear. An interesting postscript is that when we were shooting A Serious Man, we got a visit from Milo Durben, the dolly grip on Fargo. Milo, who lives in a small village in Minnesota, told us he still has the wood chipper, and every year he puts it in his town’s Fourth of July parade. ethan: We wanted a brand name for that chipper, and we came up with a lot of good names. I can’t remember what we decided on.joel: It was called the Eager Beaver.ethan: At one point it was also called something like the Eager Sphincter. Or the Iron Sphincter.joel: Right, the Iron Sphincter was another possibility.

In the mid-’60s, you two bought a Vivitar Super 8 movie camera with money you made mowing lawns. What were the titles of early Coen collaborations? joel: There was Lumberjacks of the North and Zeimers in Zambia and Would That I Could Circumambulate.ethan: And one called My Pits Smell Sublime.